Philosophy (Witt) and Communications (Lillie)

Though we now refer to them as the earliest philosophers, the Presocratics: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes did not see themselves nor refer to themselves as such. I found the introduction to the book quite fascinating because of how different the earliest philosophers thoughts and idea were from what we have been studying and how they could have impacted their studies.

A particular part of the passage summed up the fact that though they studied what would become the bass of Philosophy, they had no idea that it would become so, or that it had that kind of significance. “In ancient testimonies about the Presocratics, we find reports of writings on physics, ethics, astronomy, epistemology, the gods and human worship of them, mathematics, metaphysics, meteorology, geometry, politics…” (Curd 6). But, it wasn’t until Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato that these terms were invented or even recognizable. They tried to found the most basic principles of how the world was created and how it works.

This passage caught my eye because it states that, “No Presocratic book has survived intact, and so what we know of the early Greek philosophers is gathered from other works” (Curd 7). It amazes me that we in whole different time frame can still learn of their basic principles without any sort of proof that they wrote any of it. Most of their work was oral and at that time things were only starting to be recorded or written down. Its interesting to see that in today’s day and age we can still study and validate or invalidate the arguments of men from the times of BCE.